


The Joy of Vivisection

by illwynd



Category: Thor - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Creepy, Horror, Internalized racism, M/M, Self-Hatred, Torture, Vivisection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 08:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2540534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With Odin asleep and Thor banished, instead of trying to use the Bifrost for his purposes Loki comes up with a somewhat different way of dealing with his Jotun problem…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please mind the warnings. This fic contains some quite disturbing things. 
> 
> Happy Halloween everyone!

The king of Asgard seemed preoccupied when he returned.

Nodding absently at the guards he passed, he strode down a little-used side hallway that ran between the servants’ quarter and a number of storage rooms. He slipped out of sight around a corner, and then, after checking that no one had followed, through a door that only appeared when he spoke a certain word, and from that point no eyes saw where he went.

The door led to a narrow stairwell leading down, without rail or bannister, the walls stone that sweated condensation the deeper he went, his footsteps a near-silent rough tapping, his fingertips trailing along at his side.

At the bottom of the stairwell, it was as if one had been dropped into a mine. The air was black and damp, and unpleasant scents lingered in it. The green slime of forgotten ponds or ancient sewers. Rust and soil. An oddly animal tang. The king of Asgard, though, held out one hand, palm upward and fingers cupped loosely, and a faint light began to glow there in the hollow.  

Loki looked around himself, at the trickle of moisture that had gathered on one side of the corridor, at the dim shadows of a few other doorways just visible in the gloom before him. He walked past one—an empty room—and another likewise. At the third he stopped.

This door was shut. Locked. Just as he had left it.

That was good, but even now, after having gone to Midgard and seen Thor there, having reassured himself of what he had to know, he still needed a moment to gather himself to face what he had locked within it, and he stood there motionless staring at the handle for far too long.

_You don’t need to do this. You could leave it here and never have to think of it again._

That was not true, though. Perhaps the Jotun he had trapped and imprisoned would indeed perish, here in this hidden dungeon, if he left it in its shackles until it starved. But that would accomplish none of the things he set out to do. He would learn nothing, nothing that could bring Asgard a victory. And it would not help him to prove that he had an Aesir heart. It would only prove him cowardly, too weak to face his fears. And that was not what he needed at all.

Leaving the light hovering in midair, he produced a key from a hidden fold of his tunic and unlocked the door.

*

The Jotun did not wake at once, and Loki had a moment to gaze upon it, distaste curling the corners of his mouth.

He remembered when he had brought it here. It had been a spell of his own devising, and the creature had come into being naked on the stone floor in a pool of cold, vile fluids, shivering and shuddering and looking just-birthed and filthy despite being full grown, exactly the same size as Loki. It had opened its eyes as he’d taken an uncontrollable step backward. It had looked up at him.

Blue skin traced with foreign patterns he had seen only once before. Those monstrous red eyes going wider as it looked at him, as if it were afraid. He tried to remind himself that it had reason to be, but in that moment his own horror had overwhelmed him and he’d had to struggle not to be sick. He’d had to fight himself not to take one of his knives and end it all right then, to spill the creature’s blood across the floor.

Instead he’d turned and fled.

Now he was back, and the thing was asleep. The shackles were still on it—Loki was somewhat gratified that his choice in materials had proved adequate that the creature could not freeze them away—but the fluids had dried into a dark stain on the stone floor, and the Jotun had moved away from that spot as much as the chains allowed, curling around itself against the far wall.

Loki ambled to a spot where he could see its face better. He had been thinking about this since he’d gone, trying to come to grips with it. It was a little easier when the eyes were closed. He crouched down, staying back just out of arm’s reach in case it suddenly awoke, and peered at it. It was so strange to see his own face carved in that icy blue. But this was what had been lurking inside him all these years. This was why everything had gone so wrong, all his life. But no longer.

“Wake up,” he said, softly.

Red eyes blinked open, and he wasn’t sure the thing had truly been sleeping at all. It glared at him. Loki smiled back.

“You’re going to help me,” he said, and Loki could read the awareness in its eyes. It knew, oh yes it knew what was coming. Clever creature—though, of course, it would be. It had once been part of him.

It struggled when he reached for the chains to drag it up, to drag it toward the stone slab of a table where he meant to do his work, and as they grappled it got its icy hand on his wrist, trying to yank it away.

Loki laughed in delight as the touch burned him.   

*

Some time later—Loki was not sure how long—the creature lay bound and open on the slab, blood dripping in thick gouts down the sides of the stone.

It had struggled at first. He had tested acids on its skin, fire on its flesh. He had cut it in various places, to various depths, trying to see what defenses it had and what vulnerabilities, and at first it had thrashed and screamed until it went hoarse. It had tried, hopelessly, to fight him off, but the chains held it quite securely. It had bit into its tongue and spat at him, the blood spraying across his face.

When he only wiped it away onto his sleeve, though, it fell silent. Its eyes squeezed shut and it stopped moving, except for the occasional twitch that seemed likely involuntary.

*

“You’re mad,” the creature croaked some time later.

Loki would have thought it far beyond speech by then; its entire body was riddled with cuts and punctures, with lumps and burns and bruises. The flesh of its abdomen was sliced across and peeled open so that he could see inside. Yet speak it did, and in a voice, however ravaged, that sounded terribly like his own.

He set down the thin, curved knife he had been using.

“Oh?”

Breath bubbled out of its lips before it continued. “You think you can just cut me out of you. But what parts am I?”

It managed to smile as Loki stared.

“The parts I have no use for,” he hissed. “The parts I would be rid of. The monstrous parts.”

At that, the Jotun began to laugh, a wet and bloody laugh.

“Well, I am definitely not the parts that lie,” it said amidst that laughter.

A little while after that it had lost consciousness, head thumping on the stone as its red eyes rolled and shut, and Loki had muttered a few healing spells just to keep it alive and to stanch the worst of the bleeding. He had more to learn from the creature, and things to do in the meantime.

*

The next day Loki revived it with cold water splashed in its face, but it made little difference.

This, at least, was interesting. He was fairly sure this meant it was close to death, the grey cast that had come to its flesh and the way its ribs clenched and shuddered as it breathed, each breath heavy and labored. Its eyes opened to bare slits and it flinched away from the hovering magelight that Loki conjured in his hand.

When he touched it this time, it began to weep.

Tears—he hadn’t been sure that Jotnar could cry, but there they were, cold wet drops on the creature’s face—and choking sobs, but Loki did not care. He was poking at a mysterious blue organ hiding beneath the creature’s liver with the tip of his knife when he heard it. And then he did care.

It was whimpering Thor’s name.

Loki felt his hands clenching involuntarily, but he made his voice even, steady. Cold. “You won’t ever see him again,” he told it.

It sobbed for its brother as if it had not heard him.

“He’s not your brother,” Loki hissed, disgust almost choking in his throat. “He’s not yours.”

It begged, in pathetic whispers, for Thor to save it.

The butt of the knife in his fist, he struck it on the brow. “He will not ever know you existed.” Loki’s teeth were clenched so tight they hurt, but somehow the words felt like a scream. “He will never know of the monster that defiled him.”

The Jotun’s head lolled limp against the stone and the tears flowed down past its temples. The next sounds it made, like gasping, hiccuping coughs, sputtering out in a blackish froth—it might almost have been a death rattle. But when Loki looked, the creature almost seemed to smile.

*

Loki climbed back up the narrow stairs, a twisting horror festering in his belly.

He’d healed the Jotun just enough again, but he could not go on after what it had said. All he’d wanted to do was to run back to Midgard as he had already done—once openly, Thor begging to come home and Loki aching as he refused him, and once again in secret—to find Thor in his banishment and simply _look_ at him. To make sure there was no mark on him that Loki could only now see. To make sure he had not been visibly sullied.

In the dark of the stairwell, Loki’s memories were a warm gold glow. Thor’s body entwined with his, _beneath_ his. Thor’s lips opening for him. Thor gazing back at him with adoration in his eyes.

He had not known. Neither of them had known.

Loki bit back a sound of pain. Thor could never know.

But he was doing what he had to do to make it right. When he was done, when he had learned all he needed to, he would be able to wipe out the entire monstrous Jotun race, and that part of him would die as well, and then—then it would hardly matter what he had once been, would it? When Odin awoke, Loki would show him that. And then somehow he would bring Thor back to Asgard, help him prove himself and reverse the banishment, and then Loki would mend the damage wrought between them when that creature was still a part of him.

Thor would never _need t_ o know what sort of thing had touched him.

Loki fell asleep that night thinking of that. When all this was over, he would at last be able to become what he always should have been. He would at last become worthy of everything he had, when the loathsome part of him—the Jotun part—was finally, permanently erased.

*

The smells of damp stone and old rust and seeping mire were swamped and overridden with the smell of blood, the reek of offal, as Loki returned to that hidden dungeon room. It would probably be the last time. By the look of the creature, even his healing magic would not keep it alive much longer.

It lay limp and glistening where he had left it, and it barely stirred when he came into the room. The mutilated mess that was its belly rose and fell in slow, uneven breaths, and…

Loki felt no pity for it at all. He hated it even more for how weak it now seemed, perhaps one hard blow or careless cut away from death after only a few days of this—Loki’s teeth pulled back in a grimace of disgust at the thought, hating that this pathetic wretch had once been a part of him.

He felt no pity… but a moment of squeamishness at last made him breathe a spell to keep the thing unconscious as his knife reached the sternum.

Or perhaps it was more than squeamishness: before he could finish prying its ribs apart he went lightheaded, and then the room in all its dimness tilted and the hard stone of the floor, still stained with sticky fluids, rose up to meet him. The last thing he thought, the last thing he felt, was a strange, thin disappointment that the Jotun would most likely die without him being able to watch, to _see_.

When he came back around he was cold and the silence and darkness were both complete.

The magelight had stuttered out and the thick, wet breaths of the dying Jotun had ceased. It was over. That part of him was gone.

Somewhat unsteadily, with lingering dizziness and a faint pain in the pit of his stomach Loki clambered to his feet, summoning another light, and stood looming over the corpse.

He felt nothing as he closed the frail lids over its sunken eyes. He felt nothing as he looked it over for any last notable details, the crust of hoary ice that had already spread across its cold skin. He would dispose of the remains later; for now, he was tired, and he did not care. 

As he climbed the stairs again, his thoughts echoed with an emptiness that could almost pass for contentment.

So this was how it felt not to be a monster.

Oddly, he didn’t feel like anything was missing at all.

***


	2. Chapter 2

“Is everything all right?”

It was the third time Thor had asked that, and now his hand rested on Loki’s bare shoulder. Loki’s moved to cover it, stroking along Thor’s knuckles, aware of the oddly delicate perfection of the bones there, entranced by the smooth curve of a nail. He nodded. “Of course,” he murmured as he tugged those fingers closer and kissed them.

Everything _was_ all right. Better than all right.

Loki had made a few more visits down to Midgard, helping Thor in little ways, in secret, and after only a few weeks, he had been welcoming his brother home. Loki had been a little worried about that, but to his surprise, Thor had nodded his vehement agreement when Loki said that it would probably be best—the simplest and most stable arrangement, politically speaking—if Loki continued to act as king until Odin awoke. So that had presented no problem. Whenever Loki completed his work, he would still be in a position to do what he needed to do.

And that work was progressing well also, in every spare hour. The knowledge he’d gained, turning into a weapon against the vile creatures he had once been.

So everything was going swimmingly. He should have been happy.

But somehow, he was not.

He had begun to doubt.

It had started when Thor returned, but Loki could not blame it on Thor himself. Thor had come back changed—the old arrogance tamped down, a hesitation flickering in his eyes in its place—but one of the first things Thor had done upon his return was to throw his arms around Loki, bury his face against his brother’s neck and murmur his gratitude that Loki had not given up on him in his banishment, his sorrow that he had nearly cost them their brotherhood through his thoughtlessness. In response Loki shook his head and squeezed Thor tighter. And that first night...

Loki had not been able to stop himself dwelling on it, even as his hands roamed across Thor’s perfect, unblemished skin, feeling the warmth flowing off him, breathing deep the familiar odor of his sweat.

What would Thor think if he knew what Loki once was? Would it make a difference that he had cut that part out and destroyed it? He had been so certain of that. But now he wondered if he was somehow tainted—in a way that Thor could never be—simply by _having been_ Jotun.

Loki tangled his fists in golden hair and crushed their mouths together, trying to wipe the thought away. He let Thor curl around him, tightly, and he bit at the tender lobe of Thor’s ear and told him how he had missed him, how he wanted him, how he loved him. When Thor echoed the words he realized he was memorizing the sound, as if he expected he would never hear it again.

The next day the strange emptiness was back, and the doubt took root and began to grow.

*

Clusters of Jotun cells from the mysterious blue organ he’d found in the Jotun’s abdomen hung limned in light, a projected image in the air of the small private workroom where Loki had often practiced his sorcery. They squirmed as he made an adjustment to the formula, but for the first time the sight made him uneasy.

What he’d had to do to the thing had not bothered him. He had enjoyed slowly killing it, relished its anger and its misery and its helplessness, because it was everything he loathed and it was no longer inside him. He could have sliced it to shreds, sinew by sinew, without the slightest flicker of regret. His dreams since then had been untroubled. But now he remembered its weeping, and he shuddered.

What would Thor think if he knew the creature had cried for him and called him brother?

The cells in the projection swelled and shrank and burst and disintegrated, regenerated and died again. Loki made another adjustment, remembering his own revulsion, the urge to beat the Jotun until it was silenced, the need to never again hear those whimpers.

But how would Thor have felt if he had seen, if he had heard? Would he hate it as Loki had? Or would he somehow... pity it? Would he look at the thing and think some part of _Loki_ was left in _it_?

Loki imagined Thor seeing him there and staring at the knife in his hand, demanding to know what he’d done. Thor’s anger turning on him, as if he had done something wrong. Something monstrous.

A twinge of sharp, jagged pain in the pit of Loki’s stomach brought him back to himself, and he clenched his jaw in annoyance. That had been happening sometimes—an ache whenever he thought too much of the wrong things. The feeling of his heart thumping in his chest, shaking his ribs. Lightheadedness and a sensation of damp, sweating cold.

It was nerves. Only nerves. Impatience for this to be over.

He forced himself to focus on the samples in front of him, on the incipient weapon brewing in its vial.

*

“Are you all right?” Frigga asked the next time Loki came to see them, his mother and his sleeping father.

He had taken a seat far enough that she could not reach out to brush back his hair from his temples or any such gesture, but he practically felt it anyway as she studied him.

“You seem troubled,” she added in almost a murmur.

“I’m fine,” he said, giving her a thin smile, a fragile one. “Simply busy. I appreciate more, now, what _he_ does.”

She made a contemplative sound. She did not believe him.

“Truly, I am well,” Loki insisted. He was not going to mention that he’d had to pause on the way there, propped against the wall until the wave of nauseous, stinging weakness passed, all hollow inside him. Exhaustion, nervous dread… it didn’t matter. He was fine.  

Frigga got up, moving away from the dome of golden light and coming closer to Loki; he had to fight himself not to flinch away.

“We haven’t had much chance to talk about what you so suddenly learned about yourself,” his mother said. “Is there anything you would like to know?”

He found himself staring at her blankly.

He had tried not to think about how she must have thought of him all these years, knowing what he was. He had felt betrayed, at first, knowing she had lied to him, but then he realized he had no right to his anger. It was only natural that she had never admitted it. She was far too kind to have treated him like the thing he was. And that meant that now he was unsure whether he should tell her what he had done, how he had plucked it out like a parasite from under his skin and killed it.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. “There’s nothing.”

“You must tell me if you need to speak to me, Loki. I will always listen,” she added.

He nodded, hoping that would be enough to satisfy.

As he left a little while later, he felt as if the world might all at once shatter all around him at any moment. Or like he would. It was almost hard to breathe.

The doubt was spreading into every thought. He had no way of knowing if it had truly worked, if cutting out the Jotun part had rid him of that stain. Perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps the Norns had made him so because of something deeper, something inherent in him. Perhaps he had _deserved_ to be a monster.

If he told Frigga what he’d done, she would not be able to reassure him; she had somehow loved him anyway, no matter what he was. Odin, had he been awake… but Odin had only seen him as a tool to be used, so it would be little different.

The doubt was slowly choking him. What he needed was someone to tell him if he was truly no longer a monster now.

*

Thor was the last person that Loki would ever ask. He would not allow Thor to know the truth—he would sooner slit his own throat, or leap from the edge of the Bifrost. He could not bear the thought of the horror, the disgust that would wash across Thor’s face the moment he knew, as he realized all the things that Loki had realized. He could not bear the thought of Thor backing away from him, hand groping for Mjolnir, jaw set in hatred—and he knew he would debase himself in that moment, begging and pleading for Thor to believe he was no longer one of them, that he had fixed it all. It would be awful. If Thor did not kill him, the humiliation would.

So Loki could not allow that to happen. He could not let Thor know.

Perhaps that was why the urge started. The need to tell Thor everything.

Loki tried to bite it back.  

_I’m not actually your brother._ Loki shook the thought away with a twitch of his shoulder when they were trailing together down the hall away from the council chambers.

_Odin found me on Jotunheim as an infant. He told me the day you were banished._ Loki drowned the idea in a mouthful of mead over supper, taking in every moment but not hearing a word Thor said.

_All our lives I was one of those vile things._ Loki muffled the breath that might have said it in Thor’s skin, with the flutter of the pulse in Thor’s neck against his lips. _Every time you let me do this. I never knew._

Suddenly Thor’s hands were on his biceps and Loki realized he had gone lightheaded again, stars swimming in shadow at the edges of his vision as he swayed on his feet.

“Loki! Loki, are you all right?” Thor asked, holding him steady. And that, with the strange pain throbbing in the pit of his stomach and a wind howling somewhere in the distance, that was when it happened.

“I was a Jotun, but I’m not anymore. I killed it,” Loki said, the words spilling from his mouth, and once they started he could not stop them. He confessed everything. He told Thor about the monster that had been hidden inside him, and how he had cut it out. He told Thor what he had done to it. And all the while he watched Thor’s face, waiting for the answer that now seemed inevitable, his own body tensed beyond his control.

But Thor only stared at him, brow crinkled in confusion, as if he did not believe.

Loki pulled away. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

*

With his brother’s hand held tightly in his own Loki trod down the little-used side hallway that ran between the servants’ quarter and a number of storage rooms, even emptier and more desolate at this hour when the stars were deep and the chill was sneaking in through the walls. They slipped around a corner, and then Loki paused to speak a certain word so that the door appeared, and the narrow stairwell beyond it.

Loki tried to steel himself for the sight, for the smell. He had somehow never gotten around to coming back to get rid of the Jotun’s body, and by now the improbable ice would surely have melted. A sludge of blood and fluids on the stone floor. The implements he’d used to take the creature apart still right where he’d left them, bloody fingerprints on the handles. Shackles still locked around rotting limbs. Perhaps mercifully he would no longer see his own features in its face. But Thor would have to believe it anyway. He would have to see the truth of Loki’s words. What he had done and why.

So far Thor had only bobbed along obediently behind him as if he had no idea where they were going. Following his brother into doom like an old habit.

Loki tried to steel himself for what would come after, when Thor finally understood.

Thor was saying something, his hand placed hesitantly on Loki’s shoulder, but Loki didn’t hear as he fumbled in the folds of his tunic for the key.

The door creaked heavily open and Loki stepped through before his eyes could adjust to the gloom.

There was nothing there.

*

At least, there was no body.

There were stains on the floor. Knives and bloody handprints. No body. No reek of death.

“Someone’s been here,” Loki murmured, dazed, but even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true. The door had been locked.

Thor’s hand was on his shoulder again. “Loki, I don’t know what has happened, or what… what is wrong… but please, let us go and…”

The pain in Loki’s stomach grew sharper. There was no body. But there were knives. And bloodstains.

While the wind in his head howled, Loki tugged aside his tunic, revealing the pale plane of his belly. He shut his eyes and opened them again. He willed away any glamours, any illusions, anything that was only what he wanted to see.

The pale plane of his belly, slashed across with a half-healed scar ragged at the edges.

And the fingertips on either side beginning to deepen into blue.

He heard Thor’s startled cry, and before he could stop himself he had looked up to meet Thor’s gaze, though he knew that his brother was gazing full at a Jotun face.

He had not cut it out of himself, though he had tried. It was part of him and it would never leave.  And now Thor knew.

Loki ran then, and it was not cowardice but pain. Terror. Love. He bolted through the darkness as the magelight stuttered out behind him, because he could not bear to stay and see what would follow. To see the look in his brother’s eyes. He clattered up the stairwell as Thor tried to give chase but fell behind, shouting his name in denial.

Loki was still a monster.

But up in his workroom, he had a cure.

***


End file.
